


There’s a Light Yet to Be Found

by maplemood



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Cross-Generational Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship, Memories, Moving On, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, Religious Discussion, since this is Jack Horne we're talking about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-23 20:31:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11997411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: A part of each of them scares her, from Faraday’s wandering eyes to Chisolm’s quiet, implacable anger. When all’s said and done, though, the man standing next to her now is the one who truly frightens Emma, for reasons she can’t begin to explain. Least of all to herself.Post-battle, Emma finds comfort where she least expects it.





	There’s a Light Yet to Be Found

Now, more than ever, Emma misses her mother and her mother’s house. She’s lived out here—out West—for going on twenty-one years now. Her whole life. But she wasn’t born in such a poor, parched place. Her mother’s house had two floors, a parlor, lace curtains billowing in sunlit windows and a pantry stocked with food enough to feed ten men, at the very least. Emma misses her mother’s blue willow-patterned plates. She misses the flap of the curtains, the squeak of her mattress as she rolled over every night, warm and loved and well-fed, yet still somehow ungrateful. Restless. She’s always been restless.

Her mother, before she died, was clear-eyed enough to see that. “I know what you’re after,” Emma remembers her saying, the day after she and Matthew were married. “But I don’t know that you’ll find it.”

 Emma remembers thinking that it didn’t matter; whatever she found would be a blessing with Matthew there to find it alongside her. She traded the dust of one territory for the dust of another without a second thought.

Emma Cullen was born in dust, and to dust she’ll return. She knows this. But the knowing…well. It doesn’t make the returning any easier.  

+

 _See, Matthew?_  she thinks, bitterly as she never did while he was alive. _Look all around. Feast your eyes. This is why you died._

It’s sundown. The last bits of true light set the blasted wreck of the church afire all over again. People still wander the streets, circling what’s left of their town like ghosts.

_This is what you gave your life for._

_This is what_ you _fought for. What we all fought for,_ she reminds herself. It’s cold comfort at the best. Standing on the porch of the saloon, the boards behind her peppered with bullet holes, Emma wonders. Worries. For better or worse, she’s bound to this place now. And she’s beginning to think—know, deep in the hot, seething-sick pit of her gut—that her fighting for it was fueled more by hatred and rage (at Matthew for dying, at Bogue for killing him) than by any love for this town.

The people? Now, she’d die for them again and again. She’s got no one left to live for, after all. But what was it Bogue said, about the land?

_It won’t sweeten. It’ll only sour._

Emma almost snorts. Hell of a time to start believing the man, isn’t it?

And that’s when she hears a voice behind her.

“Fine night to be studying the stars, miss.”

Emma jumps. Blurts “Christ!” before she can stop herself. Of all the men Chisolm herded up; of all the thieves, cutthroats, and cardsharps hailing from the back of beyond or even farther, of all the seven, why does it have to be him?

“I needed some fresh air,” she snaps. “That’s not a crime, is it?”

“Why no, miss,” he says, in that high, almost wheedling voice of his. “No crime at all.”

She sighs. A part of each of them scares her, from Faraday’s wandering eyes to Chisolm’s quiet, implacable anger. When all’s said and done, though, the man standing next to her now is the one who truly frightens Emma, for reasons she can’t begin to explain. Least of all to herself.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Horne,” she says after a moment. A long moment. “I meant no offense.”

“Weren’t my intention to give none, neither.” Mild as the day is long. If she hadn’t already seen him smashing men’s skulls like crockery, he might remind Emma of her grandfather. Another big man with a voice too small to fit him, who’d pull Emma onto his lap and recite stories she suspects he’d either made up or half-forgotten. Wagon trains and redskins, scalps and haunted burial grounds. 

Horne brushes past her, light on his feet for all he’s the size of a small mountain, and lowers himself to sit on the top step. Emma winces as it creaks under his weight.

“So we are in agreement.”

Almost despite herself, Emma moves closer, leaning against the rail. “I don’t see how, sir. Unless you can tell me what it is we’re agreeing on.”

She doubts he can. From what little Chisolm told her, Emma knows that Horne lived in the mountains, almost completely alone, for longer than any normal man would consider healthy. The few times they’ve talked, it always seemed as if he were carrying on a conversation with someone else, someone she couldn’t see, much less hope to understand.

He shifts, twisting his neck to look up at her. Horne’s eyes gleam in the dying light. “The Lord don’t see fit for debts to go unpaid,” he explains, patient. “The debt that lies between us, miss. Are we in agreement that it’s settled?”

Of all the answers he could have given, Emma did not expect this.

“There’s nothing to settle.” She’s snapping again, and Horne only grunts, turning away from her like a great bear pestered by a fly. He makes Emma want to shoot something. She can’t, so she turns away from him, too, fingers curled into fists, scowling out into the night.

With the sun down and the moon up, most folk have finally retreated under whichever mostly-intact roof they can find. The street are finally peaceful in a way they haven’t been for weeks, not since Bogue set his sights on the valley. Emma still wonders when he’ll swoop back down, like a demon out of the black.

_You killed him dead enough, didn’t you?_

That thought helps her ignore Horne quite well. In fact, she’s doing it just about perfectly until he begins to murmur. Emma entire belly clenches with annoyance, but she can’t help herself. She listens closer, waiting to catch whatever the man spouts next.

He does not disappoint.

“Lord, give her Your holy understanding. Give her the wisdom to see clear—”

“ _What_?” Emma whirls around. She snarls, without thinking, “If it’s your kind of wisdom, I’m not having it. I’d rather be full heathen than half an idiot.”

“—or as clear as she can. Amen.” Horne ignores her outburst, finishing his litany with barely a pause. Still, he doesn’t turn back, doesn’t look at her. Emma wishes he’d look at her. She wishes she could look back at him and see something behind his bland, soft face, something that would give her a clue—grain, a crumb, anything—as to what the man’s thinking. What he _means_.

If he means anything at all.

+

Emma’s never been one to puzzle over signs, never seen meaning where there is none. Never but once, anyhow. When she and Matthew first came to the valley, saw the first homesteads and the glimmering lake, its surface ruffling like a bowl of soup under a giant’s breath, she thought it was a good omen. The land, the people. A place to put down roots. To grow.

She was sixteen when she married. Keeping the house was a game that first year. For all the thought she put into it (and she did, she always did; Emma’s never done anything in half-measures), it still wasn’t much different from the way she’d set up her own dollhouse back home.  Two plates on the table, two sets of curtains in the windows. The work didn’t come easy, but it felt natural, and right. She assumed it always would. That was before the baby.

The baby. Emma doesn’t like thinking of her, still, remembers but doesn’t dwell on it. The baby who, despite everything, didn’t put down roots. Didn’t thrive. Didn’t grow at all past a couple of days.

Sometimes she thinks it hurt Matthew worse than it hurt her. And sometimes she sees a gaggle of children in the streets, or the baby scooped up in Leni’s arms, and it hurts her all over again. All over again she feels raw, naked, as if her skin’s been peeled off, baring the softness and squish underneath. She didn’t think she could bear another loss like that. She still doesn’t.

Emma never saw omens before she and Matthew arrived here. After they buried Rose, she stopped believing in them entirely. She also stopped working in the house as much as she used to. She started following Matthew out to the fields even more than she had before, and Matthew, being Matthew, and _her_ Matthew besides, never said a word to try and stop her. Yet she still, until the day he died, believed it was the land that comforted her, the land that held her up even as it closed over her daughter’s coffin.

Admitting it was him means admitting that she hurts just as much now that he’s gone. It means Emma’s got no one left to depend on; if the land can’t hold her up, who will?

Emma has herself. And knows she’s nowhere near enough.

+

Silence hangs between them, not quite uncomfortable but hardly comfortable, either. Emma thinks over her words, trying to swallow down the hard knot of shame that keeps rising in her throat. She doesn’t want to imagine what her mother would do if she’d heard her just now. To talk to anyone that way, but especially such a godly man? Such a broken one? No, she wouldn’t live to see sunrise.

Emma’s eyes stray back to the great, tired slump of Horne’s shoulders. “You should go inside,” she hears herself say.

His head turns a fraction, but still he doesn’t look back. “What’s that, miss?”

“You shouldn’t be sitting out here so long. Not in your condition.”

Four arrow wounds. Close range, too. How Horne survived four arrows, when Matthew, a man more than half his age, couldn’t survive a single bullet, is a question Emma suspects she’ll grow old and bitter over.

“Lord didn’t see fit for me to die four days ago. I don’t believe He’ll see fit to carry me off now.”

It was all down to chance. Spur-of-the-moment chances (Horne, no doubt, believes they’re miracles) saved his life, and Faraday’s, and the lives of all the rest of them. Yes, Emma resents that. She knows she shouldn’t, but—isn’t it enough that they lived? Isn’t enough that they survived when so many others didn’t? What more can they ask for? What more is there to give?

“What do you want from me?” Her voice cuts through the silence like a switch.

At first, Horne doesn’t answer. Emma’s about to give up and go inside herself when the huge man shifts on the step. With a wider space left beside him now, he pats the groaning boards.

Emma huffs. She feels the hard, twisted ball of her insides uncurl just a little. In surprise or discomfort, though it could well be both. As far she knows, Horne has never voluntarily drawn close to anyone, nor asked them to draw even closer.

She doesn’t want to. She’s been too close to too many people, and never for long enough. Horne’s invitation feels more like a threat than any sort of kindness.

Then again, she’s curious.

Sighing again, just so he knows this isn’t her idea, and that she’s humoring him like the half-crazed hermit he is, Emma steps down and sits.

The fit is tight. Even edging as close to the opposite edge as she can, Emma’s arm brushes against Horne’s if she so much as twitches. Her skirts, wider and more contrary than the rest of her, rustle against his leg. Downright improper, if not scandalous, but she can’t bring herself to care. And Horne doesn’t seem to mind. Granted, he isn’t what Emma would call studied in the finer rules and mores of society, but. He’s the most righteous of them all. And he doesn’t so much as glance over. In fact, he doesn’t so much as speak for a good five minutes after she’s settled herself.

“You had some family, Chisolm tells me.”

 _Had_. He rests on the word with a heaviness she can’t help but hate. They were—are—hers to mourn. Not his.

“What a coincidence, Mr. Horne. Chisolm told me the same about you.”

“No coincidence, miss. It’s the Lord’s will. We’ve all here lost somebody.”

“The Lord’s will? Is that what you think?” Emma props her chin on her folded hands, squinting into the darkness. “Was it the Lord’s will for my husband to bleed out, with no one there to help him? Or Leni’s husband, or Nancy’s two boys? Was it the Lord’s will that Mr. Faraday have his legs blown clean off? Was it…was it his will for my baby to die? Or your babies, Mr. Horne, did God have them born just to be slaughtered? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

Horne stills beside her. Emma feels it, the frozenness that creeps into his great frame, and her voice, so cold and still, like ice crusting a deep, black river—her voice falters. She shouldn’t have said that. She shouldn’t have forgotten, even for a moment, that Horne carries a rage inside him. Tame though he looks now, it’s still there. It smolders. It’s a rage, Emma realizes for the first time, much like hers. And like hers, it could consume him at any minute.

What if he were to throw Matthew’s death back against her? Or Rose’s? (She didn’t tell Chisolm about the baby, but she knows he’s guessed.)

“I’m sorry,” Emma says. Quick, trembling, trying to hold off the flood. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—“

Horne stares fixedly ahead. “Betsy,” he tells her.

“What?” Emma asks. Softly now, still trembling.

“Betsy, Ruby, and Salita.” Horne’s voice doesn’t catch, but it lingers over each name. “My own children. And they were shot down before me like your husband.”

“I know,” she says. “Mr. Horne, I’m—”

“I cursed God on that day. Maybe you don’t believe it, miss, but I did. I did.”

They sit side-by-side. They don’t look at each other. They’ve entered some other place, some time suspended between the moment they sat down and the moment they’ll have to get up, retreating back to the light and the hard, stricken faces of people who need them to be strong and certain. If she looks at him, Emma knows the spell will break. She owes him it to him, to make sure it doesn’t. Not yet.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Horne says, “to look inside your own self and find no refuge. An unholy thing.”

It strikes Emma that these words are the closest thing to sane she’s ever heard out of him. It almost makes her laugh.

Silence comes between them again, and stretches. Emma fingers work in the folds of her skirt, clenching to fists, then unclenching. She takes a deep breath, rubs sweat-sticky strands of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand.

What’s given must be returned.

She sucks in another breath. “My baby’s name was Rose. When we came here, there wasn’t much town to speak of. Then it sprung up, and, well, she was long gone by then, but Matthew thought it was a fine way to honor her. A memorial.”

Matthew once told her that he felt Rose’s presence, in the land and all around them. He’d been a little drunk, and very sad, when he’d said so; it took Emma a night of sweet words, and sweeter things done in bed, to turn his mind to better things. It comforted him, though, that notion. So much that she never told him the truth.

“It didn’t help,” she now tells a man she hardly knows. “I don’t see her anywhere. I miss her, and I cry for her, and she isn’t there. No more than Matthew is. If that was the Lord’s will, I can’t forgive Him for it. I can’t forgive anyone. Anyone,” she repeats, and suddenly Emma feels it, tender inside her and swollen fit to burst. No. She won’t let herself break. She can’t.

But she doesn’t have much of a choice.

“This was Matthew’s land,” she rushes on, ahead of the tide but just barely. “Not mine. He died for it, and—and I’ve fought for it, I fought for him…but I don’t love it. I can’t stand the sight of it anymore.” Emma breathes in, deep and ragged. She doesn’t look at Horne. “He’s buried here alongside our daughter, I should…Mr. Horne?”

Why does she ask him? Why does it come out a question at all?

The big man doesn’t answer, but he finally turns, angling his body slightly towards her.

“This isn’t my home,” Emma says. For a minute she’s transported back to the fireside of the house she misses so much; her mother is in the pantry, measuring out flour for biscuits, and her grandfather is by Emma’s side, listening. Her voice is a child’s again. “I don’t know where to go.”

Once she had roots. They’re gone now, and she can’t forgive God that, can’t forgive _them_ that, but no more can she stay in this place. Almost idly, Emma feels herself slumping forward, hears the awful, sodden sounds she makes. In the end, she breaks very easily.

It’s a long time—or it feels like a long time, anyway, minutes or hours or years—before she can stop. And long before she does, Emma feels his hand drop down and settle over her shoulder, heavy as a rock. It weighs her down; she’d be lying if she said that didn’t comfort her, if she didn’t admit to feeling that she’s burst apart, or fly away, or sink down into the night-black dust, without it. Horne’s touch is not comfortable, or practiced, but it’s a tether, an anchor. Emma leans into it and sobs.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps, when she catches the breath to sneak a word or two in between.

“No need for that,” Horne mumbles.

But she’s not apologizing for her tears. Emma needs to make that clear. “I hurt you,” she says, trying to wipe her cheeks dry with her fingers and getting nowhere. “I shouldn’t have. I said it before, Mr. Horne, but I want you to know…you need to know…I didn’t mean it. No.” She rubs harder. “I did. I wanted to hurt you, and I’m sorry for it.”

He’s been hurt worse. That doesn’t make Emma feel any better. As if this man, who’s fought with her and asked for nothing in return, should be able to bear her pain along with his own. That’s the root of it, really. In the days since they met, Emma’s recognized her own rage, the strands of pain and loneliness and unbelonging, in him. If she couldn’t ignore them (and she can’t; Horne’s made sure of that), then at least she could hurt him. And maybe, through the hurting, pass that pain on. Drop it on his back and walk away unburdened.

Walk away? Christ, where to?

Emma presses a hand to her mouth, trying to smother her noise and failing miserably. Sooner or later someone else will hear her. They’ll understand—they will—but they won’t _know_.

Beside her, she hears Horne take a deep breath, probably gearing up for another prayer. His hand’s still on her shoulder. Impulsively, Emma reaches up, covering his thick fingers with her thin, sharp ones. Another long, shuddering breath rakes through her. Passes into him.

“Weeping may last for a night,” he says. Horne’s voice isn’t deep, or commanding. It doesn’t force her to listen. “But joy comes with the morning.”

“Is that what you think?” Emma asks. This time she isn’t looking to use it against him. She wants to know. Truly.

“Some days, miss. Not many,” he admits. “But some.” His fingers tighten, almost enough to bruise; for a minute Emma can imagine he’s holding on to her as much as she is to him. “Weeping has to come first, though. Don’t seem fair. Don’t seem _good_ , miss, but that’s the way of things. The Lord’s will. There’s no help for it.”

What they do next blurs in Emma’s mind, thanks to the tears clouding both her vision and her head. She drops her hand, Horne drops his, she leans closer, or maybe he does; Emma isn’t sure but it ends with her cheek, still damp, resting against his shoulder. Horne reaches up, and his fingers, very slowly and very, very hesitantly, card through her tangled hair. Part of Emma wants to jerk away. Part of him must too. It’s the kind of closeness that he isn’t used to anymore.

She wonders how old his daughters would have been by now. Her age, likely. Or older. He does he remember them? How will she remember Rose and Matthew? Frozen in time, like the memories of her mother and her grandfather, or will they shift, uncertain as ghosts, growing old along with her?

The dark closes around them, and the land waits under them, and there’s no help for that. But the morning will come, eventually. There’s no help for that, either.

+

_The debt that lies between us, miss._

Emma will never be able to guess exactly what Horne meant by that. There’ll come a time when she realizes that she doesn’t have to, and a time even farther on when she’ll realize that it could’ve been as simple as all the unspoken things that lay between them.

_Are we in agreement that it’s settled?_

“Settled” would mean an ending. The only real endings, Emma suspects, come once you’re dead. Which she isn’t. Yet. For now the closest thing she gets is the day she leaves Rose Creek.

The land and the houses—they matter, but they’re not what Emma will miss. It’s the people she fought for, and it’s Matthew and Rose, and Leni and Teddy and all the rest, whom she leaves behind. Not forever, Emma hopes, but for a long time. They were her family. Still are. When it comes down to it, though—maybe she isn’t proud of this, but it’s always been Emma’s habit to grow restless, to leave one part of her family and set off with a new one.

_I know what you’re after, but I don’t know that you’ll find it._

But that hasn’t happened yet. It hasn’t happened yet, on the night when she sits with Jack Horne on the porch of the saloon that’s halfway blown to Hell and snorts back the last of her tears.

“When we set out again…” Horne starts. It’s not speculation. Of course they will. “Seems you can fend for yourself well enough. Better than most, I guess, and so long as it don’t bother Chisolm, or Red or the other boys neither…”

 _He’s not crazy,_ Emma thinks. _He’s shy._

“…If you’d like, miss,” he finishes. “And if the mountains don’t give way and the day of Judgement come before then. Which it might. It very well might.”

Well. That and a little crazy.

Emma’s smile is thin and watery and painful. It’s hard-won, too, so she lets it linger as she turns to him.

“Thank you, Mr. Horne,” she says. “I’d like that very much.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so it turns out I have a massive amount of feelings for a relationship that doesn't even exist in canon. Oops. There're a couple interesting parallels between Jack and Emma's stories, and I like to think that if he'd lived they might have connected over them.
> 
> The two songs mostly responsible for influencing the mood of this story are "The Last Pale Light in the West" by Ben Nichols (where I swiped the title from) and "Ain't No Grave" by Johnny Cash. Jack's "joy in the morning" quote comes from Psalm 30, verse 5.


End file.
